When I picked up Assassin's Creed last week, it was only because I had to play something till the release of Mass Effect. To be honest, I was not even intending to buy it because of all the negative press it got, what with repetition and all that. But I did go ahead and buy it and, in the end, ended up enjoying it a lot. Free-running is one of the best innovations in recent times. Obviously, the game has borrowed a lot of concepts from the new Prince of Persia series - even more so because both games come from the same development teams - but still Assassin's Creed took the concept of free-running to a whole new level and it kept me quite involved with the game till the end even though there were lots of other flaws in the game. The game's presentation really made free-running as fun as it was. I loved the way citizens would pause and say stuff like, "He is going to get hurt and when he does, I won't help him" and so on which made the whole world very immersive and realistic.

Apart from free-running, I loved the game's story and was absolutely pissed with the ending which blatantly leaves it open for the, as of yet unannounced, sequel. I really liked the unique two-faceted approach to storytelling and the game did quite a commendable job in keeping me interested in the plights of both Desmond Miles and Altair. Albeit, the main focus was obviously on Altair and I did become quite attached to him over the course of the game. Even more impressive was Altair's characterization. Altair starts off as an arrogant, over-the-head sort of guy who thinks the assassin's "creed" is below him and this gets him in trouble. However, as he completes each assassination and hears the confessions of his victims, he gradually becomes softer and it felt as if he was constantly maturing throughout the course of the game. I cannot wait for the inevitable sequel to move the story forward. The ending does pose some interesting questions as to Desmond's bigger role in the sequel and it will be interesting to see what Ubisoft can pull off with it.

I found the missions themselves to be quite interesting. The investigating to be done before the assassination was fun for a bit but it got repetitive and boring by the end of the game. However, I did like doing these missions just for the heck of it. Following the victim to a secluded place before beating the heck out of him to get the info and then silently doing off with him was intensely satisfying each time. I also liked pickpocketing because it was always funny to watch the people's reactions after they have been picked off. The assassinations were a bit of a disappointment for me personally. What was a bit of a downer was that you always had to move through the crowd and fight the battle, there was no means for silent killing. In 2 or 3 missions, I got on buildings and waited for a few minutes for my target to show up before realizing that you had to be within the crowds before the memory actually began. That being said, I did have a few surprises. In one of the missions, the vigilantes that appeared when I saved a citizen took hold of my target and I took a big leap before driving my hidden sword into his neck which was intensely satisfying. I also did quite a bit of planning as to which escape route to take back to the Assassin's Headquarters which was also a lot of fun and helped me overlook the game's repetitive nature.

The extras were also fun to achieve but it was also sad that they did not have any bonuses attached to them. I did not go out of my way to collect all the flags or kill all the templars. Both of those, I did whenever they appeared in the place I had run to. Still, jumping inside a narrow street after becoming anonymous only to find a templar waiting was quite satisfying. I did, however, try to save all the citizens and did visit almost all the view points in each of the cities, which was also a lot of fun to do. It was pretty sad that even the architecture of the viewpoints started to repeat over time and even across cities as well which took away from the immersion a bit.

There were other issues with the PC version such as an overly-long exit process (thankfully, Atl+F4 worked fine for me) and the fact that the game was always displayed in 16:9 aspect ratio. The aspect ratio issue was more annoying for me because it caused a lot of letterboxing at my resolution (1280x1024). There was an unofficial fix for this but it started crashing with the 1.02 patch, so I played without it. However, I did not really notice these issues once I really got into the game and, overall, I found Assassin's Creed to be one heck of a fun game. It was not without its flaws but then what game is. I wouldn't hesitate in recommending it to anybody who is looking for a quick way to pass time and run riot within three cities during the crusades for the Holy Land. For more, I have posted a review here.

Also, I am still going to be maintaining most of my gaming-related stuff in this blog as well as posting all my reviews here also. I also started a blog on blogger but more desi and other personal stuff will be going there.

To finish it, here are a few screenshots of my favorite viewpoint in the game. I really liked climbing this one, mostly because it was very different from the rest of them and it offered a wonderful view of the whole city of Acre.

During the year 2007, there were some pretty disturbing trends being seen as far as PC gaming goes. PCs have always had a bit of an upper hand over consoles due to the variety of titles being offered and even exclusive genres like strategy that could be played effectively only on the PC. But the year 2007 marked a change to that with formerly PC exclusive franchises like Command and Conquer and Unreal Tournament being offered to my console-playing friends and sales of amazing PC titles like Crysis and Unreal Tournament III being overrun by sales of consoles and console titles. Take this as an account from a longtime PC gamer on the decline of the PC as a gaming platform.

The major problem with the PC as a gaming platform is the high overhead it has over its console counterparts. The price of buying a decent mid-end gaming PC is about as much -- if not slightly more expensive -- than buying a current generation console and a decent 1080p HDTV to play games in their entire splendor. The difference lies in that anyone can go to a shop pick a console package that suits their tastes and an HDTV that looks good to them and they are all set to game. With PCs, you do need to have some sort of understanding about what is happening with the current technology to put together a PC for yourself; even if you are going to buy a pre-built PC from one of the numerous manufacturers like Alienware, Dell etc. it pays to know the current happenings in the PC hardware industry.

Another major setback for the PC industry is the amazing prices of the graphics cards that power the games of today. With prices like 450$-500$ for an Nvidia 8800 Ultra which is the most powerful card out there, no wonder even long time PC gamers are shifting to console gaming. Both Nvidia and AMD-ATI caught the hook of this disturbing trend and released two wonderful pieces of hardware in the Nvidia 8800GT (which is powering my own personal PC) and the Radeon HD3870 which lets gamers play games without having to empty out their pockets. Even with these two amazing value-for-money cards, the consoles with their major attraction being a one time investment in their 3 or 4 year lifetime are managing to entice more PC gamers to turn over to consoles or in general attract more non-gamers to the gaming hobby.

Even with the aforementioned two GPUs, one would still need to tinker with all the different settings to get the game to look good and play good on your personal computer and most people don't have the time for that. As good as Crysis looks, if anyone wants it to run decently and look as good as it can, it does require a lot of tweaking and editing the game's configuration files -- again most people do not have the time for those sort of things, hence the decline in PC gaming.

An additional very disturbing precedent set as far as PC gaming goes is the poor porting job done on console-to-PC ports. Of course, the vice versa is not true as proven by amazing PC-to-console ports of The Orange Box and Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars on the Xbox 360. However, games like Resident Evil 4 which did not even have PC specific controls properly defined including a lack of total in-game mouse support and Guitar Hero 3 which was riddled with bugs and slowdowns which rendered the game almost unplayable at even the lowest settings prove the fact that porting console titles to PCs is not even a major priority for most developers and the only reason we do see these titles getting ported is to fill the coffers of the respective companies. That is not to say all console-to-PC ports end up being a total waste of time -- case in point, Gears of War which did have many PC exclusive features and which did come with a minimal number of problems -- but still looking at the majority of console-to-PC ports does not bode well for the future of such ports.

Apart from the above mentioned issues, the biggest of them all is the overall decline in the sales of PC titles. With November-only sales of PC titles like Unreal Tournament III and Crysis being 33,995 and 86,633 according to NPD numbers whereas those of even a lower quality console title like Mario and Sonic at the Olympics for the Wii being more than 300,000 which means that maybe PC gaming is not as profitable to developers as it was before. Hence, we see PC titles being ported effectively to consoles to boost their sales and even the only PC-exclusive title in Crysis ending up being in the form of a trilogy -- again a tactic to potentially increase overall sales. Above all, the lack of sales for the quality PC titles is so far the most disturbing trend to come out of the PC gaming industry in 2007.

However, when all is said and done, it is not too bad being a PC gamer going into the year 2008. With thought-to-be-dead PC franchises getting sequels in Starcraft II, Fallout 3 and Mafia 2 and even Far Cry 2 and even totally new IPs from established PC developers like Id Software with Rage, Ubisoft with Tom Clancy's End War and EA Games with Will Wright's Spore - things are not looking all dark and grim for the PC. Whether all these titles will live up to expectations and will actually produce financial profits for their respective developers remains to be seen.

Note: This article can also be found at Aeropause.com.

So, I completed Neverwinter Nights recently and I have to say I was amazed by how well it played considering its age. The main reason I played it was that I am getting a new computer in December and I know I will be busy playing The Orange Box, Crysis, Oblivion and almost every other great game from the past three years, so I will have no time to play this. But I am glad I chose to do it because it gets added to Planescape Torment, KOTOR, KOTOR2 in the list of amazing RPGs I have played.

Although I completed it over the course of about 6 months (WOW!) it never stopped getting better from time to time. And part of it is the story. To be honest at about the middle of chapter 2, I was not much impressed and incredibly many of the sidequests had better substories than the main one itself. But the twist at the end of the second chapter really hit me in the face. And from then on I thought it was really epic with quite a bit of history of the gameworld and so on. Though it was not as complex as Planescape Torment I felt it was awesome and quite epic in its own right.

I played KOTOR before this and at the beginning I was a bit put off by the graphics and gameplay. But since I stuck up to it, I was able to overlook the graphics and the gameplay got really interesting one I started leveling up and the amount of exotic items we can find in this game is incredible and some of it really helped in certain sidequests which would have been difficult without these items. I would suggest anyone who plays the game to atleast put up until the end of the first chapter because the gameplay and story of the later chapters is well worth some of the turn offs of the earlier ones.

Overall, I really enjoyed Neverwinter Nights and it ranks as one of the gaming experiences I most enjoyed. On other notes, since my exams have started no gaming for about 15 days after which it is going to be gaming marathon and madness with the new system and The Orange Box, Crysis and others and I hope to bring certain impressions of those games like this one in my own quest to keep this blog alive.

For people who care, here is my full review of the game.